But if she had been a Delilah she couldn’t have betrayed me more completely. Frosty motioned imperatively for me to go on, but I had pulled up at her first word, and there I stood, waiting for her to finish, that I might explain that I had not lightly broken my promise; that I was compelled to cut off that extra sixty miles which would have made me, perhaps, too late. But I didn’t tell her anything; there wasn’t time. Frosty, waiting disapprovingly a length ahead, looked back and beckoned again insistently. At the same instant a door behind the girl opened with a jerk, and King himself bulked large and angry in the lamplight. Beryl shrank backward with a little cry—and I knew she had not meant to do me a hurt.
“Come on, you fool!” cried Frosty, and struck his horse savagely. I jabbed in my spurs, and Shylock leaped his length and fled down that familiar trail to the “gantlet,” as I had always called it mentally after that second passing. But King, behind us, fired three shots quickly, one after another—and, as the bullets sang past, I knew them for a signal.
A dozen men, as it seemed to me, swarmed out from divers places to dispute our passing, and shots were being fired in the dark, their starting-point betrayed by vicious little spurts of flame. Shylock winced cruelly, as we whipped around the first shed, and I called out sharply to Frosty, still a length ahead. He turned just as my horse went down to his knees.
I jerked my feet from the stirrups and landed free and upright, which was a blessing. And it was then that I swung morally far back to the primitive, and wanted to kill, and kill, with never a thought for parley or retreat. Frosty, like the stanch old pal he was, pulled up and came back to me, though the bullets were flying fast and thick—and not wide enough for derision on our part.
“Jump up behind,” he commanded, shooting as he spoke. “We’ll get out of this damned trap.”
I had my doubts, and fired away without paying him much attention. I wanted, more than anything, to get the man who had shot down Shylock. That isn’t a pretty confession, but it has the virtue of being the truth. So, while Frosty fired at the spurts of red and cursed me for stopping there, I crouched behind my dead horse and fought back with evil in my heart and a mighty poor aim.
Then, just as the first excitement was hardening into deliberate malevolence, came a clatter from beyond the house, and a chorus of familiar yells and the spiteful snapping of pistols. It was our boys—thirty of the biggest-hearted, bravest fellows that ever wore spurs, and, as they came thundering down to us, I could make out the bent, wiry figure of old Perry Potter in the lead, yelling and shooting wickeder than any one else in the crowd.
“Ellis!” he shouted, and I lifted up my voice and let him know that, like Webster, “I still lived.” They came on with a rush that the King faction could not stay, to where I was ambushed between the solid walls of two sheds, with Shylock’s bulk before me and Frosty swearing at my back.